🥳 This website turned 14 yesterday!

I only know this because Paul Graham Raven’s VCTB celebrated its 17th Birthday. I was chatting to Paul on signal and I went spelunking though my emails to find my domain renewal/birthday date – and wouldn’t you know it was the next day!

As of the time of writing, thejaymo.net has 530+ posts and over half a million words on it – 528k to be exact. Wild. As I said the other week, the next redesign of this site needs to surface some of this content more.

Back in 2019 after a big server move I put together a post with screenshots of all the iterations thejaymo.net has been though in the 14 years it’s been alive. Maybe I’ll do another next year when it reaches 15, as it’ll have a new theme by then.

As you can see on the right I paid £18.77 for 2 years of domain hosting back in 2009. The renewal on thejaymo.net this year was over 20 quid for one. Inflation maaaan.

Bought at 2.39pm on a Wednesday! I was working in call centre back then, maybe I was a team lead already? either way I was almost definitely pissing about buying domain names.

I remember using GoDaddy as my domain registrar back then as it was the only one I knew of.

As in the same way that Squarespace is currently taking VC money and using it to underwrite seemingly half the Internet’s creative class with advertising spend, GoDaddy was doing the the same in the early podcast sphere.

It’s really funny to me that I bought Startselectreset.com at the same time as thejaymo.net.

SSR being the name I’m using for my subscriber zine. Issue One came out in 2019 so it took me a decade of sitting on the domain to find a use for it.

It really does seem like the week for blog birthdays as Jason Kottke has spent the week celebrating 25 years at Kottke.org.

Christ, 25 years . The internet in 1998 was a different country.

Speaking of old school internet. This week I came across a screenshot on an old hard drive. From 2005! Behold oonagi.co.uk the phpbbs forum I grew up on!

Oonagi was the beating heart of South East Kent’s hardcorepunk/live music scene. I was an admin there as a teenager, but the site was run by its ‘President’ Kevin Carmody. Kevin was a really good friend growing up, who in addition to teaching me ‘How to Internet’, he also taught me ‘How to Diabolo’. We were both Linux nerds.

Incidentally (and unsurprisingly) Kevin is now technical director at whotargets.me the browser add on that lets you learn about the political ads targeting you. Man haven’t seen the guy since his wedding. Kevin! hope you’re all good!

Being an admin on Oonagi really taught me a lot about ‘virtual communities’ and their dynamics. I learn’t a lot – and made a lot of mistakes, boy I have some stories.

phpbbs is my native social media and as web2 falls apart I miss it. It’s making me want to set up a forum on thejaymo.net for friends and paid supporters?

Permanently Moved

There Will Be Crisis

From nowhere north winds may howl. Waves may rise with such violent fury that they may come to threaten the artist’s craft. In such times the artist must lash themselves to the mast of their own integrity. Muster all the courage and strength they have, and do what they can.

Full Show Notes: https://www.thejaymo.net/2023/03/18/301-2310-there-will-be-crisis/

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Photo 365

The Ministry Of My Own Labour

• Calls!
• More Calls!
• Writing!
• Booking Flights!

Terminal Access

Damon Krukowski over at dadadrummer posted a really interesting piece on Planned Obsolescence. In particular I found this bit on digital film projectors interesting:

Even the digital projectors themselves – hugely expensive devices pushed on theaters by a consortium of the major studios, and in particular a pressure campaign from their manufacturer Sony in 2009 – are now failing and in need of replacement. But Sony has since gotten out of the projector business, and stopped maintaining existing projectors in 2020. The capital investment theaters were forced to make, as they supposedly left analog behind for good, lasted barely more than ten years. They traded an experienced labor force for a machine that was designed to fail, and would then need to be swapped for another new expensive machine – or a new platform (streaming) altogether.

It makes me wonder about ‘The Metaverse’ and the sort of hardware it’s going to find success on.

Dipping the Stacks

App founder quits Google, says company doesn’t serve users anymore | Ars Technica

Google is “trapped in a maze of approvals, launch processes, legal reviews, performance reviews, exec reviews,” and other bureaucratic processes, and while the

Activision Blizzard’s China exit hurts World of Warcraft users – Rest of World

3 million players — some of whom made their living on WoW — are now without their beloved pastime.

How human voice artists inadvertently contributed to Apple and Spotify developing AI synthetic voice – Good e-Reader

A clause included in the contract that the authors and the audiobook distributor Findaway Voices agreed to and which enabled Findaway to let companies like Spotify and Apple use the audiobook files as machine learning training and models. Spotify went on to acquire Findaway last June.

“Nothing” doesn’t exist. Instead, there’s “quantum foam” – Big Think

at the tiny quantum level, empty space isn’t empty. It’s actually a vibrant place, with tiny subatomic particles appearing and disappearing in wanton abandon. This appearance and disappearance has some superficial resemblance to the effervescent behavior of the foam on the top of a freshly poured beer, with bubbles appearing and disappearing — hence the term “quantum foam.”

China is adding solar and wind faster than many of us realise: three charts that put it in perspective

China adds enough solar and wind every year to cover the total electricity use of major countries such as South Africa, Spain, and (almost) the UK.

Reading

I finished reading Rebecca Blood’s 2002 book about blogging The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice On Creating And Maintaining Your Blog. I know Colin Walker has just got himself a copy, and Bix has referenced it recently too. There is so much interesting stuff in this book. Written by someone who lived though the invention of the form, it has a lot of interesting context and history. I didn’t really start reading blogs until i had 24/7 internet at university. I was particularly taken by Bloods general rules/heuristics about posting stuff on the internet. To do well on twitter or TikTok you basically have to break all of them. On my kindle I clicked though some to some of the blog links and it was … sad (?) to see some of the domains dead and/or now just link farms.

After finishing the book about blogs, I moved right on to If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland – first published 1938. I’m only 30-40% of the way in, but it seems to me that this book casts a long shadow over all the great ‘writing books’ in the 20thC. Everything seems to be downstream of this book.

Continuing with my ‘classic’ reading theme I read the 1949 book Giant Brains; Or Machines That Think by Edmund Callis this week. It’s the earliest book on AI for a general audience. It’s fantastic. People at the birth of the computing industry had a far more straight forward ontology around ‘If it thinks, it thinks’. I wonder when the shift happened the 1970’s maybe? Not sure. Over the last few years I’ve read a lot of history of computing books, but this is the first on i’ve read that is straight out of that history and I really recommend reading it, especially in today’s context.

Music

thejaymo.net Spotify Playlist

covert – Firebird (Single)

Song of the week without a doubt is Firebird by the mathrock/mid-west emoband covert. Taken from their forth coming album Catharsis

covert is the band of YouTuber guitarist yvette young. You might know them from the video that wen super viral ‘midwest emo on crack’. One of the things I like about Firebird, (and all of young’s work) is that they are really good at taking a single music riff and iterating on it. This track is an extended exploration of a msuic idea without it overstaying its welcome. I fried of mine prefers his math rock riffs more angular than covert’s sensibilities. But I like ’em – all their riffs sound like a bag of pebbles worn smooth by running water.

Remember Kids: